Godard: The Last Revolutionary

"The Right is stupid because they are cruel; the Left is stupid because they are sentimental,"
--Jean-Luc Godard (from Made in USA)

When the French New Wave movement swept through the cinema in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jean-Luc Godard quickly became the most prominent and, increasingly, most controversial figure among.this unique collection of critics turned filmmakers. Even at the beginning of his career, with the production of Breathless (France 1959), he was the most experimental of the New Wave artists. During the 1960s, however, he also became the most overtly political filmmaker in France as his cinema increasingly maneuvered between post-Modernist aesthetics and Maoist politics. Not that Godard viewed film as a mere platform for political expression. For Godard, the cinema was already an extension of the political world and the film maker's sense of camera framing and editing were the equivalent of an ideological statement.

During the 1960s, Godard became concerned with the dismantling of narrative cinema and the eradication of the potentially reactionary political content inherent within traditional cinematic forms. Rather than create comfortable "stories" for his audience to watch, Godard concentrated on exposing and fragmenting the techniques and structures of film making itself. In turn, his films increasingly juxtaposed the narrative text with the actual process of film making, thereby forcing the viewer into an active engagement with the screen instead of a merely passive acceptance of the film. Further, Godard's experiments were not simply an intellectual exercise. They were the first steps toward a new, and highly radical, reassessment of art, language, society, and political ideology.

Pierrot le Fou (France 1965) is loosely based on a second-rate American paperback novel that was originally a cross between a mystery thriller and Lolita. Godard, however, was more interested in the political crisis that dominated the early 1960s, including the wars in Vietnam, Yemen, and Angola, the aftermath of the Algerian Revolution, and the Kennedy assassination. His producers were, on the other hand, hoping for a gangster film. In Pierrot le Fou, Godard essentially took all of the above references and mixed them into a colorful wide screen collage in which the greater whole of the narrative is purposefully meant to be less important than the contradictory statements of the film's various scenes.

For Godard, the political world expresses itself through the structures of personal life. Une Femme Mariee (France 1964) is, on the surface, a sardonic view of modern marriage. However, the film really concerns itself with the way in which advertising controls our subconscious and thereby conditions the attitudes of society. Godard has accused advertising of being a form of fascism because of the way it attempts (often successfully) to bypass rational thought and manipulate people's needs and desires at an irrational level. The title character of Une Femme Mariee is framed through-out much of the film against a backdrop of billboards, neon signs, and other ads. She is a product of a society controlled by the marketplace.

A recurring motif in Godard's films is the idea that modern society is predicated upon the buying and selling of people's bodies, minds, and talents. In such films as Une Femme Mariee and Vivre sa Vie (France 1962), prostitution is presented as the major metaphor for modern life (or as Bertolt Brecht wrote when he worked in Hollywood: "Each morning I go into the market­place to sell my wares"). The need to sell one's self in the marketplace is, according to Godard, what modern society has reduced humanity to.

Vivre sa Vie is also the first film in which Godard completely integrated style and subject matter, Divided into twelve tableaux, Vivre sa Vie is constructed more as an essay than a novel. Each section of the film is a different paragraph in the discourse, and the fragmented theme music by Michel Legrand is used as a punctuation. Godard's camera movements and long-takes are the methods by which he constructs his sentences. As in a fugue, the soundtrack in Vivre sa Vie is meant to counterpoint the visual images rather than to accentuate them.

Superficially, Masculine-Feminine (France 1966) is a character study of three Parisian youths. The personal details of their lives, however, are actually an extension of the events surrounding them and throughout the film the violent schisms of society intrude into the film's foreground. Further, the film freely flaunts the artificiality of the narrative form by interjecting into the text references to other narratives, including the play Dutchman by LeRoi Jones and a film-within-the-film which presents a sadomasochistic Swedish version of a story by Guy de Maupassant. The real subject matter of Masculine-Feminine is the decade itself and the contradictions of the 1960s.

The production of Le Gai Savoir (.France 1968) marked a crucial transition in Godard's cinema. The experiments of the early and mid 1960s, and Godard's attempt to reform narrative film making, were over. Now, Godard was determined to destroy narrative film making and force the cinema to a "zero-degree" style from which a new, politically radical, form of film making could emerge, Further, Godard's critical concerns had gone beyond the limited world of the cinema as he became increasingly preoccupied with language and its ideological content. The meaning of words, and the way these meanings shape our understanding of the world, is presented in Le Gai Savoir as the first major battleground for revolutionary change.